Dana Goldstein

Dana Goldstein, a former associate editor and writer at the Prospect,comes from a family of public school educators. She received the Spencer Fellowship in Education Journalism, a Schwarz Fellowship at the New America Foundation, and a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellowship at the Nation Institute. Her journalism is regularly featured in Slate, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Beast, and other publications, and she is a staff writer at the Marshall Project.

Recent Articles

Yesterday Bill Gates -- one of the nation's leading education reform philanthropists -- delivered an address to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Over 90 percent of American school funding comes from states and localities. That means state legislatures are where education policy actually gets made, despite fireworks at the federal level . Let's take New York state as an example: Albany controls whether Mike Bloomberg 's mayoral control of schools will continue. It decides how many charter schools can open in a year. After lobbying from the teachers' union, it prevented individual student test scores from being considered in the tenure-granting process for teachers. So when Gates -- a proponent of merit pay, standardized testing, national curricula, and charter schools -- speaks to state lawmakers, he is appealing to the folks who can either empower or put the kibosh on his agenda. And in a nutshell, here is his statement on what that agenda is: No factor advances student...

Over the next year, the Office of National AIDS Policy, led by Dr. Jeffery Crowley , will come up with a strategy for fighting HIV in the United States. That project is long overdue. While the Bush administration devoted unprecedented resources to combating HIV/AIDS in the developing world, it largely ignored the epidemic here at home. Over 1.1 million Americans live with HIV. In 2006, over 56,000 new infections were recorded. And the disease is increasingly associated with minority communities and the poor; in Washington, D.C. , the major American city with the highest HIV/AIDS rate, 4.3 percent of all African Americans are infected. Among black men in D.C., 6.5 percent are HIV-positive. Internationally, the HIV-prevention method gaining the most momentum -- and attracting the most press -- is male circumcision. A series of studies conducted in Africa found that circumcision decreases female-to-male HIV transmission by as much as 60 percent. That is because the cells of the foreskin...

Yesterday the Senate Finance Committee trotted out Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Elmendorf to state the obvious : that health reform is really, really expensive. To pay for it, we might have to provide doctors with incentives so that they don't order unnecessary tests and operations. We might have to raise some taxes. Now, predictably, centrist senators are using Elemendorf's Captain Obvious statement to "resist timelines" on health reform, Ryan Grim reports . Slowing the momentum is a bad idea. The House has a bill ready. Senate HELP has a bill ready. We're only waiting for Senate Finance, and while these are the people tasked with making the tough choices on how to pay for health reform, we already know the options. Ezra Klein breaks them down : a) Support, as the CBO says you should, the eradication of the tax exclusion that protects employer-based health-care insurance; b) Support, as Lewin and Commonwealth say you should, a public insurance option that can bargain at...

Something is really wrong when a major American Jewish leader complains that the president is doing too much to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Anti-Defamation League's Abe Foxman : Still, I continue to sense that the administration is putting too much weight on solving the conflict. We all want to see progress and I have no problem with the administration view that the U.S. must be much more engaged to achieve progress. But I am concerned when expectations rise dramatically, as when the president says that he expects the problem to be resolved in two years. These are the words of someone who might, just might, rather see the conflict continue than see Israel forced to make tough choices on the settlements and a whole host of other issues. But when one nation is occupying another, peace doesn't come without concessions. As David Kurtz writes , Foxman's phrasing is "unintentionally revealing." -- Dana Goldstein

As Ben Smith reports , in advance of the secretary of state's major, agenda-setting address yesterday , Hillary Clinton 's aides pushed the phrase "muscular" to describe her approach. Smith writes: But the early spin gave, at best, a very partial and misleading sense of what Clinton actually said yesterday. The most "muscular" portions were the carefully-drafted signals to Iran and Saudi Arabia, which represent the White House's formal stance, not Clinton's personal vision. The more personal elements of the speech -- the ones that actually carry some meaning for her stature and role as Secretary of State -- were in the realm of what used to be called "soft power," and is now called "smart power." Indeed, Clinton led the speech with a joke about the importance of the United States "multi-tasking" on the international stage -- "a very gender-related term," she said. Her agenda -- from focusing on expanding women's economic opportunities in the developing world, to beefing up civilian...